WTF?? Please excuse my adolescent shorthand lingo . . . but what was that last column all about? As of when did Lord A ever feel fear??

signed,A Concerned Citizen

Dear Concerned Citizen,

I too was concerned to read your missive, and so I did bring together the best mind of my operation in order that we might explain the situation. First, we shall have each of the minds who is not directly involved to guess as to what has happened. I have asked each to read the column and to contemplate what they are presented with. Here is how they responded:

Jarwaun, my teenagéd typist: Well, I ain't no science doctor, but either Mr. Squid is just straight-up messin' with us, or he been foolin' with Uncle Terry's magic phone again, which ain't that bad a thing, but if he has, he really got just say so straight up, 'cause we talked about not doin that—or doin nunthin that involves Unc T.—and also 'cause if Unc T. 'round again, he owes Pop $60, and that's also a thing. Pop worse than mad, he disappointed 'bout all that.

Molly: Ugh. Melinda. Great; your consciousness travels to some alternate quantum branch of the multiverse where there's no Detroit, Rob is a quasi-functional Churchie, and I'm some sort of Toledo-suburb trailer trash. Someone better phone the Dalai Lama and tell him that karma doesn't fucking work.

Rob: Well, shit, A) I am, like, totally disappointed that even if I'm fucking Catholic, I still totally talk like me, man, you know? That speaks to, like, some kind of intrinsic me-ness that stretches across the multiverse and space and time, and basically completely fundamentally fucks with my sense of that nature/nurture schtick. That shit is not cool. And, like, B), also, I gotta say that Reneé really squares this shit away. Nuff said, you know?

And now, here is the perpetrator of this strange crime, ready to explain himself:

Leeks: Immediately before you left on your strange adventure, I anesthetized you and had the little cuttle fish surgically implant a poison pill beneath your cerebellum. The pill was first set up to release its toxins upon the random decay of a specific atom. That same atom had been entangled with another atom which was carefully constructed to trigger a recording device.

The intent of the poison was to kill you, but to not kill you permanently. Derived from certain rare toxins, it would kill you first through a complete shut down of your heart and brain function, and then a carefully engineered second capsule would burst and release the necessary stimulate for your rejuvenation.

By this process I planned to connect our world, via the audio recorder, to a world where a parallel squid and office might reside, different in some ways, but similar in others.

This, of course, would all tend to indicate that the "distinguished" "Mr." Kalmarrochki is even now somewhere within the confines of my tank—a most disturbing reality for any of us to feel obliged to contemplate, and thus—

Tom (via audio recording): Hey, is this on? Hello...? {pause}, ooo-kay. So, I guess this goes out and it doesn't come back, right? So, I finally came in and checked on this, did a scan of Lord A., etc, and then, like we had this accountant, I think his name was Sang . . . hard to keep track, because Mr. Leeks spun the accounting division off in 2004 because it ran such a huge profit that it was worth investing in on its own. Anyway . . . ooooo-kay . . . so, am I just talking to myself?

{long pause, breathing}

I think Sang poisoned Lord A., and this Lord A. is not the real Lord A., and Sang did a weird thing with the TV, because once I had completed my scan and seen the collapsed poison capsule and this radioactive stuff, then the TV turned on and I saw the lab, but everyone was slightly different, and there was a French monkey talking about post-structuralist theory, and there was an accountant who basically described . . .Hey, I hear my voice playing on a tape recorder on that television!

Rob: Where did that camera come from?

Rob: Where did that camera come from?

Man, I have to turn the TV down, that echo is . . .

Rob: Where did that camera come from?

Okay, volume off. So, you are listening to a tape recording, and I am watching you listen to that tape recording, and I just turned off the volume, because the delay was causing a this wicked-sick echo—oh, shit, are you Tom? Dude, I think I had your jacke—

oh, man, I feel really ill . . .

I gotta turn this off. I am turning off the TV and the tape recorder. What else got entangled?

Rob: Where did that camera come from?

Leeks: I am aware of no other entanglements.

Rob: Where did that camera come from?

Rob: Dude, did you know that in German, the word in physics for entanglement is, like, basically totally the same word as 'hug'? For reals.